Monday, June 11, 2012

Hair of the Dog

I don't want this blog to become about alcoholism any more than I want my life to become all about it. But I had a period of sadness and depression following my deliberate relapse of the weekend, and in consequence I wrote a long maudlin post about it. Never fear -- I'll give you the Reader's Digest version.

At first it was fun. Fun to damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead. I wanted a drink, and I was acting on that feeling. I knew that I was doing something BAD and, as Chris n the Morning once said, "Sometimes you just have to do something BAD."

It was fun for about the first three or four drinks. Fun for the first evening. Then then it was not fun.

It's such a shock when an entire day goes missing. Disbelief is so intense that it even outweighs self disgust. The disgust doesn't come until later, when it's late Sunday afternoon and you're dragging yourself out of bed wondering what in hell happened to you, to the last 36 hours. Then the booze is dying inside you, and you feel like crap and you feel stupid, and the stupid feels worse than the physical discomfort.

I realize now that I must never have been sober, truly and completely sober, for a period of several years. When you're drunk all the time it becomes who you are, nobody can tell the difference because there isn't any.

All of the anxiety and depression and sadness that I have been mercifully free from lately began filling up in me like rain in a barrel. Doing the chores, taking a shower, all carried such a sensory burden that it had me begging for mercy once again. I began to wonder, what in hell is the point of me? What am I even doing here? When my mother was alive, at least I had a definable purpose. All that I have now is a job that I hate and days that can be slept through with no one else in the world to even notice that I'm gone.

So, what am I feeling now? Renorse? It's hard to feel remorse for a deliberate action that you knew or at least suspected was going to have consequences (that's why I don't buy it when murderers make courtroom apologies to the families of the people they have taken out of the world). There is regret that it turned out so resoundingly bad, that I lost an entire weekend over it, but the thing that hurt the most was the feeling that I hadn't actually missed very much. The soap-opera world turns. Poor me, boo-hoo, nothing to live for.

Now -- the booze has bled out of my system and the anti-depression, anti-anxiety pills are doing their job, and I'm no longer beating myself up about it. The afterburn of the booze is long gone and I'm no loner feeling the desire to jump off a bridge over it. It happened, I learned something, and the learning wasn't fun, and that's all. I get to do what all relapsed alchies get to do in these cases: start counting over.